Fire School

As I return to my hotel room with hands blackened by soot despite the gloves I wear, smelling like smoke through and through, muscles sore and fatigued from a week of strenuous activity, I realize that I have just completed a week of fire school!

During this week of training to be on the emergency response team at Palmer Station, we worked with scba breathing gear, fire extinguishers, fire hoses, communication (super important), and how to search a building for victims or fire.

For me, personally, this is one of the coolest things but also the hardest things I've ever done. It was a very physical week. You spend a lot of time crawling around in the fire house in gear that is heavy and often with a charged hose. Also, one day they sent us through a pretty physical obstacle course to run our tanks out of air.

Fire school also proved to be a mental struggle for me as well. It's just didn't feel natural at first to be sitting right next to a fire or searching a room darkened to the point of blindness by smoke all the while breathing in a and out like Darth Vader in my SCBA gear. I'll admit that at first, I had to bail out of a couple of situations. I think it all came down to trusting my gear. My mask was a little too big for my face and would leak when I got sweaty. Once I understood that this wasn't going to be too detrimental, I just rolled with it. By the end of the week, I was rescuing victims out of smoke filled buildings and on the hose attach team to put out fires.


Click here for some photos